


The Life And Times of Vraska The Unseen

by Biomancer



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Elf, Golgari, MTG, Other, Ravnica, Royalty, gorgon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-03-31 07:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13969770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Biomancer/pseuds/Biomancer
Summary: What are the origins of Ravnica's most notorious criminal? Who is Vraska The Unseen? Is this gorgon a savior of the downtrodden or a murderous tyrant? These are The Life And Times of Vraska The Unseen, a story on how Ravnica's Public Enemy Number One came to be.





	1. Prologue

Prologue.

 

* * *

 

The Undercity Palace

 

“ATTEND”

The mental command rang through Ružica’s head like a bellowing gong. The elf immediately rose to comply. In the service of the Sisters, hesitance was incompliance, and incompliance was a stony death. The half-revived grašak bean shoot she had spent the last few hours carefully demortifying in the servant’s tiny chambers fell apart into rank brown goop on the floor. Wasteful, but so be it. Clean up later, more urgent matters now.

The Devkarin elf locked her room, and quickly strode through the dark halls of the underground citadel. The servant quarters were quite some distance from the royal chambers she was summoned to, courtesy of centuries of extensive and ill-thought-through redesigns, though several discreet passages made the journey a matter of minutes.

Ružica and her fellow serfs weren’t usually summoned quite so early in the morning. Something must have waylaid the regular attendants. Or they were dead. Given the tumultuous nature of the Golgari nobles, the latter was more or less the order of the day.

Given in service to the Court since she came of age, Ružica had survived thirty years in the palace by staying unassuming and quietly serving. Her position was relatively unambitious, but what higher ambition counts above survival? The revered Matka sought greater things than the Sisters would ever allow her, and she’d find herself paying the price for that soon enough. No, the shadows suited Ružica just fine.

Ružica approached the gold-inlaid door to the personal lair of one of the Sisters of Stone Death, the Guild’s royal matriarchs. Despite her surely not being the first servant to arrive, the place was as silent as a tomb.

The elf took a breath, then steeled herself. Being in the presence of the gorgon was enough to court death at every turn, but actively disobeying one was an outright headfirst plunge into the grave. Ružica pushed open the door, only just narrow enough to slip through. She stepped in silently, eyes cast down to the ground, then closed the door.

“Your Highness?” Ružica asked.

“Here, and sssshut up,” replied the royal gorgon, “Come to me.”

Her presence acknowledged, Ružica dared look up. The room was even darker than the rest of the Guildhalls, but like all who lived in the Undercity, the Devkarin had adapted. A simple attunement of her vision enchantment, and Ružica could see as if day.

The gorgon sat naked and upright in her enormously lavish bed, the sheets of which were tussled and messed about over her lower body. Her eyes glowed a bright yellow light and she looked both exhausted and filled with murderous fury. Surrounding her bed stood about twenty still, humanoid, forms, a good number of which Ružica recognized as her former colleagues, people she had spoken to mere days ago.

Ružica refrained from any expression of surprise. Whether the Sisters felt they needed to exert dominance, or make a point, or felt someone had displeased them, the end result was always recognizable. So far, Ružica had been able to stay abreast of such events. If she wished, the gorgon could kill her instantly, but apparently this was not her intent today. She felt a ping of sympathy for her former fellows, but her own survival took priority.

“Here, elf, unlessss you wissshh to join them.”

The elf quickly approached the awaiting gorgon, then kneeled before her, in between two petrified servants.

“What need have you, your Highness?”

The gorgon shifted somewhat, and growled in frustration. Was she hiding something in the bed?

“Today, you are blesssed to be tardy, Ruzzzica. Of courssse, it would have been you… It would be a wassste if you had to go the way of the ressst…”

Ružica looked to the floor again. The Queen knew her by name. Not a good sign.

“Yes, your Highness…” she affirmed.

“Risssse…”

Ružica did so, forcing herself to look at the gorgon’s face, knowing that to not do so would guarantee her death even more. Surrounded by writhing tendrils, her expression was a bizarre mix of disgust, exhaustion and bile. It was the worst Ružica had ever seen her Queen appear in all her years of service. For all the inequality in their statuses, for a brief moment the elf found herself pitying her monarch.

The gorgon grunted, and Ružica returned to reality. She was a lowly servant to a mighty Queen, and there was to be served. The elf did not consider herself on familial terms with the gorgon, and any delusions of favoritism were best forgotten about.

Quickly, Ružica retrieved fresh cloth and a small bowl of water, as per her usual duties. She offered the bowl to a waiting tendril as usual, and waited for the Queen to douse her head with the water. Unexpectedly, the royal gorgon instead opted to drink the entire contents of the bowl in three gulps, then dismissively let it fall to the ground, which it hit with a deafeningly loud clang, to the gorgon’s immediate displeasure and regret. Ružica stopped the clanging terror in nary a second, but the damage was done.

The bed-ridden gorgon snarled and her powerful tendrils lashed around in frustration. Ružica just barely managed to duck away from the frenzy, but a few good hits on her back and shoulders knocked her to the floor. Painful bruises starting to form, but by now Ružica was used to living with those. She bit away her tears, and endured. Live, and heal, and live on.

Both gorgon and elf remained where they were for a moment. After a few seconds, Ružica rose as if nothing had happened, and reapproached the heavily breathing gorgon. She stood by the side of the bed while the Queen stared forward into the distance.

“I need… I need you for more than what it isss I have you for.” the gorgon said. She held out her claw and Ružica took it.

The gorgon turned herself to face Ružica, their faces only inches apart now. Scaled tendrils descended, grasping the elf on her head and shoulders, holding her possessively in place. Ružica flinched as the cold tendrils touched her, but persevered. With no choice, Ružica looked her master in her deadly golden eyes.

The gorgon hissed lowly, protesting against herself. She kept her and her elf’s heads low and together, as if to confide a secret, despite no other living thing being in the room. Of course, the walls did have ears in the Undercity, and _especially_ in the palace.

“One lassst tasssk for you, my mossst ussseful ssservant. Quessstion, and perisssh. Sssucceed, and live… asss a free elf.”

Ružica’s eyes went wide, her mouth dropped and her ears twitched. Free. The very possibility had barely ever been more than a vague hum in the back of her mind. What… what would she be able to do? What wouldn’t she..? The elf’s mind raced with visions and possibilities, momentarily forgetting she was surrounded by corpses and their recent killer.

“I sssee it in you, little ssslave… Yesss… you are the one I need… the only one who ssseesss…”

The gorgon yanked on Ružica’s head to snap her back to reality.

“You will lisssten, or I will decccide for you!”

“Yes…Yes, your Highness….” replied Ružica meekly, still shocked.

The Queen growled in affirmation.

The gorgon attempted to move the sheets, but the once-peerless silk fabric resisted thoroughly, stuck and coiled and wrapped up in an immovable clot. She uttered a furious hiss, and with the rip of sharp claws, a large strip came loose, and the contents of the bed lay fully exposed.

She discarded the torn fabric, and then Ružica saw.

The royal gorgon sat around an egg. A beautiful egg. With a bright green shell, adorned with darker shades and with an almost hypnotically smooth geometry, a somehow utterly majestic looking egg laid between the naked gorgon’s legs, covered in hardened slime and bits of sheet. Ružica’s eyes went wide in awe.

“Your Highness.. You… you’ve… That is…” uttered Ružica.

“What it isss isss a _missstake_ ,” said the gorgon, “One that cannot persssissst… My sssissstersss… They would… Ssshe would…”

Caught off guard by her own stumbling, the gorgon paused, and steeled herself. She took her clawed hand off the egg, then balled it into a fist.

“No, we mussst be ssstrong. Weaknesss is for the weak. The weak ssserve the ssstrong. I am not weak. We are ssstrong. Thisss is weaknesss, that isss all it isss...”

Unable to yet fully comprehend the unprecedented situation, Ružica made the simplest gesture of support instinctively. No longer servant to master, but woman to woman. She reached for the gorgon’s hand.

At lightning speed, the gorgon coiled around the egg, sheltering the fragile thing with her body and a dozen tendrils, while at the same time, she hissed and struck Ružica’s hand away with her claw, slashing shallow gashes in the elf’s hand. Ružica yelped and jumped back, clutching her bloodied hand.

Ružica drew magic and sloppily mended her wounds. She’d have time to tend better to them later, but right now the situation required all of her focus.

By the time Ružica looked back, the gorgon slowly ran the tip of one of her tendrils over her claw, staining the very end of it crimson. In total silence, she drew swirling shapes of nonsense writing on the brightest spot of the egg, right on the top.

“Elf.” said the gorgon without turning her attention away from her charge.

“You will take it, and you will disssappear. I ssshall never hear anything from you, or it, ever again. Fail me, and you will wisssh for death a thousssandfold.”

Take it? _Take a gorgon egg_ …! _A **ROYAL** gorgon’s egg_?! … And then what?

“Do with it asss you sssee fit, Ruzzzica. Burn it, sssmassh it, throw it to a sssvogdamned wurm for all I care! I… I… I just need it _gone_ …”

Ružica looked at the pitiable woman in front of her. A gorgon, a Queen, a woman, and a mother. And Ružica understood. In no way that can one can rationally explain, she understood. And she was silent.

Ružica reached for the egg, but much more cautiously, as if trying to approach a scorpion. The gorgon turned her head away, making an particular whimper, a sound that Ružica had never heard before or would again. A pitiful, vulnerable and downright hurt sob came from the normally so inscrutable sovereign.

Ružica carefully lifted the surprisingly heavy egg from the naked gorgon’s embrace. A few tendrils kept touching the sticky shell for as long as they could.

When the last tendril let go, Ružica clutched the egg to her chest, then took a big bundle of the ruined fabric to hide it under. It felt warm. It felt like it needed to be held. It needed a guardian. It needed Ruži.

Precious life, as tiny and fragile as can possibly be, pulsed inside the all too thin shell, radiating into Ružica’s heart.

She took one last look at the gorgon, who still had her head turned away.

“Go away…Both of you… and never return… There isss no place and no peace for you… ”

Ružica walked a cautious few steps, learning the weight of the egg. Slowly, maneuvering with light steps between the statues, she moved to the exit without a sound.

Before she even touched the door, she knew what to do and where to go. Ružica faded into the shadows of the palace and was never seen again.


	2. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It'll be a while until I'm ready for the next proper chapter, so here's a nice picture from between chapters 1 and 2 to tie you over!

 

Art by Zomburai! (http://zomburai.tumblr.com/)


End file.
